??????

Whatever belongings I didn’t sell, I either kept or traded at the markets. And now, a week in, I wear cotton overalls whose olive-green tone is stained with smears of red and purple and yellow—and so I suspect, before I traded for these, the overalls were used for gardening.

Now, they are used for the decrepit tavern.

I’m on my way there now, and though it is close to the markets of Cheapside, I don’t consider it close enough. Not when I’m carting two hefty tins of paint through windy streets.

The boots that clomp beneath me are blue suede, beloved boots that have adorned flimsy, lovely outfits in the past. My life is different now, and so are the boots with toes darkened by the wet cobblestone I trek, and heels scuffed up the edges.

A week and some phases into my independent life—a life that still feels foreign to me, distant almost, like I have not yet joined my reality to my body—and the remainder of my clothes are on the verge of ruin.

Those ruined suede boots skim the surface of a puddle as I turn onto the street that, in a few paces, opens to the Square.

I’m not on the street for a heartbeat before a squeaking sound chases me.

“Nari! Miss Nari!”

I startle at the sound of my name in a child’s voice, then, slow, turn my chin to my shoulder.

I watch the sticky thing scramble down the cobblestone street towards me, his mother chasing after him.

But the boy is ahead of her, gaining on me.

Litalf. That much I can tell by his blunt front teeth bared in an ear-to-ear grin; the softer edges of his pointed ears; and there’s always that added aura when around a dokkalf, an instinct in my bones that crawls, and I don’t get that now.

The flesh of my hands tugs under the slipping weight of the paint-tin handles.

My face twists, uncomfortable, and I shift my weight from boot to boot as the child draws nearer, his little shoes scuffing and skidding now to stop himself from tumbling down the sloped street he came from.

The only discomfort I suffer at present is the threat of this sticky youngling, a toffee apple fastened to his lopsided belt, and I fear the boy might contaminate me.

A wooden sword swings from his sticky grip—and as he skids to a stop in front of me, I cringe back on instinct.

The youngling doesn’t notice, he is undeterred in his flurried excitement. “Watch! Watch me! This is you!”

I blink down at the boy.

His feet swing apart to plant wide, and he throws out his arms, as though they are clawed at the hands, and he snarls something throaty, but warbled, the war cry of a youngling.

He lunges with a sudden hiss.

I flinch.

My boots scrape over the cobblestone, a swift two-step stagger back, away from the little vicious creature gnashing at my knees.

The urge to boot him is strong enough to tense my toes in my boots.

I steel myself.

“Did you watch?” His viciousness vanishes, and he lifts a blank look up at me. “I was you.”

The youngling’s mother finally reaches us.

My face sours—her quick steps, while fast-paced, are too slow for my liking.

The look I level on her is anything but kind.

She doesn’t notice. Her flushed face is turned down to the child as she rushes out the words, “Run off again and I will clip your ankles.”

My brow hikes.

Dokkalf parents I do imagine are harsher than litalf ones, and I don’t question this dokkalf mother to a litalf child. Kithe is teeming with all sorts of blended families. At this point, I doubt I would be too shocked if a pixie flew past me now, followed by a brood of waddling ducklings for kin.

I do wonder one thing; how true the threat of the mother is. Will she really do it, clip his ankles?

Dokkalves can lie, after all.

And the threat doesn’t strike the child.

He keeps his bright look up at me.

Snatching the scruffy creature by the wrist, the dokkalf throws an exhausted glare up at me. “He has not ceased his obsession with you since the second passage,” she sighs and tosses her purple tinted hair over a shoulder. “We hide the swords, he finds the true ones; we put him to bed for the rest but find him later in the tree. And he won’t stop,” she enunciates with a rattle of his wrist, “giving the dog his meals as offerings.”

“No trade, no life,” the youngling says with a nod, a nod like he has it all figured out, as though I do.

But I don’t.

I don’t know what to say, so I just say, “Oh.”

“I will be like you!” The youngling bounces on the balls of his feet. “ Fren and foe beware !”

Those last words are spoken with too much confidence in their errors. Certainly a phrase he has heard around, friend and foe beware , but not one he understands—or articulates.

Uncertainty pinches my face as, slowly, I lower to one knee. I place the tins flat on the ground and level my stare with the child’s.

There is too much hope and admiration in his eyes, the way he is looking at me; and I need it to stop. But it feels wrong to kick him away.

So I bring my thumb to my teeth, then bite. Rubies are quick to spring from my flesh.

The youngling watches, eyes alight and sparkling blues, as I reach for the wooden sword.

I smear the droplets over the sword’s hilt. “There. Now I’ll be with you in all your battles—and you might share some of my strength.”

His face splits with a grin brighter than the stars.

I only frown in answer before I snatch the tins and push up from the road.

The mother’s stare finds mine—and hooks.

For a long moment, we just look at each other.

Then, with an incline of her head, a gesture I cannot mistake for anything but a thank you, she firms her grip on the youngling’s wrist and steers him off the path.

I watch them go.

The chime above the door rings.

“We are not open.” Eamon calls out from the tavern’s musty bar. The wood needs a wash, scrub, then a varnish, but that’s a chore for another day.

This phase, we paint. The walls, the ceiling trim, the windowsills. We paint it all a soft, faded hue of sage. Eamon’s pick, since it is his tavern.

He has a silent investor—and I suspect the identity of the anonymous funder. The other investor is me, since we used my pouch of coin to get us started at least with a dwelling, and I offer my labour.

But Eamon remains the majority owner.

So sage green it is.

I heave the tins of paint through the doors. The heft is pulling on my arms—arms that feel like melting, stretching toffee from the seaside villages.

I grunt because that’s all the greeting I can manage before I hoist the tins onto the wooden crate.

Standing on the bar, Eamon pauses. The long handle of the paintbrush he uses to reach the corners of the ceiling, it stiffens in his grip as he starts to turn a frown over his shoulder.

“The tavern is not open,” he repeats, firm. “Come back after—” His eyes flutter with a blink before his shoulders relax.

“Just me,” the words breathe out of my aching chest as I slump onto a round table. Not to be precious, but this work—this hard, gruelling labour—is getting to me.

Eamon carefully lowers the long paintbrush to the other side of the bar. I can’t see through the thick wood, but I do imagine he rests the brush-end onto the paint tray before he wipes his hands down his front. “Did you get the right shades?”

My exhausted answer comes in a faint nod.

I scoot my bottom onto the edge of the rickety table, then fall onto my back, legs dangling. “I have fans.”

“Pardon?”

“Fans. Well, a fan. A youngling.”

“Oh?”

There is no pride in the way I stare at the ceiling, the wooden beams coated in dust and spiderwebs. “He brandished his sword—an impression of me.”

There’s a heartbeat of silence before doubt hitches his response, “Did you use a sword?”

“No.”

“Can you use a duster?”

My smile is wry. I throw him a side-glare, but he just winks back at me.

But there is little choice. There is work to be done.

I am slow moving in my lethargy. But around Eamon, there is no slacking allowed.

‘ This is life, now, Nari ,’ he murmured those cruel words to me just last Quiet as we huddled around a sooted fireplace. ‘ We have no servants, no monies, no security. If we do not work, we do not eat, we do not live .’

So we work.

Eamon tackles the ceiling, cleans a portion with the long duster, then washes it with the rag tied to pole, then dries it with a towel tied to a pole, then paints it.

I find his work is not envious. My arms ache at the thought of it.

My labour is restricted to the floorboards.

I am a spider, crawling around the floor, under tables, around stacked chairs, scrubbing the wood raw with my bucket of soapy water and the coarse brush in my blotchy hand.

Then a chime pauses me.

The gentle ringing song is followed by the thudding of bootsteps, slow and uneasy, and the groan of the door.

“Not open!” Eamon snaps from out of my line of sight. Probably still at the bar, maybe on it, maybe behind it.

Since I’m tucked under a row of three tables pushed up against the windows, I can’t see—can’t make out much of anything beyond stacked chairs.

“I am not here for a beverage.”

The unfamiliar voice furrows my face with a frown.

I crawl out from the dust balls and tables.

The dewy soap residue clings to my hands, flat on the slick floorboards.

Eamon’s voice comes, “Then what is your business here?” There’s an edge to his voice, one that stiffens me—and turns my movements slow.

I am careful as I slip out from under the final table, slow to rise up from my crouch. I land my gaze on the brown leathers of a litalf male.

The litalf warrior says, “I’m looking for a Narcissa Elmfield.”

For reasons I don’t quite understand, I think fleetingly of the Sacrament. Narcissa Elmfield . I’d never heard my full name so often before that wretched tournament.

My jaw clenches at the reminder of the passages, the snow of a mountain splashed with blood quick to sear into my mind.

I blink the image away and tilt my head as I eye up the intruder.

His face is muted, one that can’t be recognized because it’s so unremarkable for a fae.

I wipe my hands on a paint-spotted piece of cloth. “What do you want with her?”

His gaze swerves to me.

He blinks for a beat, as though he hadn’t seen me tucked away over here, but of course he had, he just didn’t see me as more than a shadow slave, a peasant, someone not worth a second glance.

He looks me up and down for a beat, considering me. Almost feels like he’s sizing me up, assessing my weight and skill in challenge. “I am to deliver a message.”

Father …?

Something lodges in my throat. A ball wound and weaved from all sorts of clashing emotions, somewhere between hope and dread.

I take a step closer to the strange male. “From my family?”

A warning from Eamon draws in my gaze.

He flicks his frown between me and the stranger, once, twice, then he shakes his head, a slight gesture—

But one that the stranger notices. “The message,” he starts, then reaches behind his back, “is from Lord Braxis.”

A flicker of surprise steals me, and it holds me long enough that I’m utterly frozen as the stranger draws out a knife from his belt.

Eamon’s growl is suddenly distant, “He is dead.”

The male does not waver his stare from mine. “His promises are not.”

Before he can do a damn thing with that blade, Eamon has dropped the paintbrush and jumped off the bar. He lands with a thud, a weapon of his own glinting in his fist, the knife he keeps tucked up his sleeve.

But Eamon is no warrior. And neither am I.

I happen to be more of a lucky survivalist.

Right now, with Lord Braxis coming back from the dead to get me, I think I need a lot of luck.

I am plenty a fool, but not enough to be without a weapon.

The litalf chucks the knife right at me.

I drop, scrambling for the hem of my boot.

My knees skid over the soapy floorboards, drawing me closer to the edge of stacked chairs, and I fish out the blade.

I fist it in my grip, arching my arm back—just as Eamon rushes at the litalf. He doesn’t reach him, not before the light warrior has swivelled with a kick to his head.

Eamon crumples. Blood streams down his dazed face. He is awake, blinking, stunned, but awake—and that means he is alive.

The litalf turns on me, but the kick and the turn knocked him off balance. The floorboards are soaked with water and soap.

His boots are slipping, as are mine as I scramble to stand, the blade fisted in my uneasy grip.

I keep my narrowed gaze on him as I make to throw the blade—but then he staggers, not forward, not unbalanced, but rather a stunned slackness stealing his face as he staggers to the side.

His head tilts to the side, his lashes fluttering, a frown aimed at me as though I have baffled him, stirred his curiosities somehow.

Still, my arm is tense, arched, the knife aimed at him.

I know the moment I throw it, my whole body will be knocked off balance like his, and that will distort the aim of the blade. I need this right, I need this perfect.

Before I can do anything at all, the fae blinks at me, frowns—then crumples.

He hits the floor, hard. Then he slides a little, his blank gaze fixed upwards at the ceiling, his leathers gently gliding over soapy floorboards.

And I realise I am watching a corpse glide.

I stare at the body, so obviously a corpse.

One heartbeat, two, three, four—five…

I lift my gaze to the female standing in the doorway.

Tar for eyes, just as she has tar for blood, and perhaps stone for a heart, Melantha considers me for a long moment. Her weight is leaned forward onto one leg, as if ready to pounce, her fingers pinched around the blade of a second throwing knife—the first one plunged into the back of the stranger’s head.

It takes me too long to catch up.

The hilt of a knife protruding from the stranger’s mop of sandy hair, right at the back of his head. Melantha’s stance at the open doorway, and the way she’s watching me isn’t to consider me like I first thought, but to wait for my thanks, my expressed gratitude.

A thanks is an unpaid debt.

The moment the words escape my lips, I acknowledge Melantha’s deed and she can collect on it whenever and whichever way she pleases.

I don’t please.

So I turn a long look to Eamon and the meaning isn’t lost on Melantha, who I’m certain is sharper than her own knives.

I toss aside her act of protection, not for me but for Eamon. Her nephew. Of course she helped him.

I’m merely in the way.

Eamon pushes up from the floor, a sour look wrinkling his face. He aims it at the attacker and, after he rubs his temple a moment, he strides three steps before he boots at the unmoving legs.

As dead as the corpses of the Sacrament.

I huff a weighted breath and look at Eamon. “What the fuck was that?”

The expression he aims at me is grim. “Lord Braxis returning from the dead.” He turns his chin to his shoulder—and touches a frown to Melantha. “What are you doing here?”

An eyebrow slowly lifts above a glittering black eye. “Are you not grateful?” Her tone might be gravelled, a threat, but she can’t mute the gleam in her spilled ink eyes, the thrill of murder alighting them with whitish glows from the jars. “I saw that one peeking through the windows before he worked up the nerve to come inside.”

Strange he was nervous, if what she says is true. The packed muscle on this stranger, though dead, seems all too lethal. So why would he be wrapped in so much hesitation before coming to finish his bargain with the dead?

Eamon answers my silent question, “Daxeel.”

I throw him a furrowed look, my mouth slanted.

He doesn’t look at me as he presses a folded cloth to his temple. “Even with your rift, how can anyone know for certain that his protection is gone?”

With a huff, he considers the broken table he’d planned on sanding down, then painting a soft blueish shade. Unless those fragments glue together nicely, that plan is to be tossed aside now.

Melantha takes two steps, the leather of her boots soft on the oak floorboards, careful, as she fights the soapy slip. She moves like a drop of ink down a wall, a trail of darkness, all black breeches and blouses and boots and hair—and those onyx eyes of hers searching the body with a sweeping glare.

It takes everything in me not to steel my shoulders or let my upper lip curl over my teeth.

Melantha has always set me on edge, but this phase the instincts whispering and skittering through my body are telling me to keep away from her.

I haven’t seen her since the second passage began, and foolishly I was hoping to avoid her for the rest of my life.

She might, after all, blame me for Caius’s death in some form of tangled thought process, of delusion and manipulation of the facts. But of course, hatred rarely allows for facts.

If she doesn’t blame me for Caius, she did watch me plunge a blade into her only surviving child—and that might be enough to put my life in danger.

But there is no avoiding her now—not when she’s right in front of me, a corpse between us.

“Daxeel, and everyone else,” Melantha doesn’t mutter the words as a passing insult; rather she lifts her chin and looks me dead on, wanting me to see her, wanting me to hear her, hear the unspoken insult that I need everyone to protect me.

I narrow my eyes on her. “I did just fine on my own. Maybe he was nervous after hearing about all the ways I managed to kill others on the mountain.”

The smile she answers with is not quite a smile, but a fleeting, smarmy look she softens as she turns on Eamon. “You must come visit Hemlock. There are family matters to be discussed.”

A shutter of hesitation steals Eamon. He swerves his alight gaze to me, embers gleaming from behind a honey glaze.

“I will see she returns home safe.” Melantha sounds as pleased about escorting me home as I feel.

My mouth puckers with the blatant annoyance of it all.

“After we deal with this,” Eamon sighs and gestures to the body.

I tilt my head and study what should be a bloodied, crimson floor or puddles and pools and a metallic stink. “Am I not seeing correctly,” I wonder aloud, “or is the knife plugging the blood?”

Melantha doesn’t look shocked by the knife stopping the blood somehow from pouring out of the head, or even remotely impressed by it.

“It is cleaner this way,” is all she says about it, before, “I will send Rune and Samick to clean up during the Quiet. Less eyes then.”

Eamon grunts his answer, but the clench of his jaw and the moodiness of his harsh expression tells how put out he is by it all. Not so much the stranger coming for me, but more the broken table, the dead body on our tavern floor before we’ve even opened, and the call of his family business when he’d earlier proclaimed we would finish the whole third coat of paint before next phase.

Instead, we leave the place as is.

And before we part ways on the street, Eamon to head for Hemlock House, and Melantha to escort me to the cheapest streets of Kithe, he swoops a farewell kiss over my brow.

And I suffer a walk with Melantha. I don’t manage the full length of the Square in silence. The air is too thick between us, too awkward.

And every time I risk a side-glance at Melantha’s profile, features sharper than knives, sculpted glass shards, I find that her jaw is that bit tenser than before.

I start with a short huff. “At some point, this is going to end, isn’t it?”

She looks ahead, unwavering, not a flicker to ghost over her blank expression, like I didn’t speak at all.

Her steps are in sync with mine, though hers are gentle and soft on the cobblestone where mine are scuffed and clumpy.

I stuff my hands into the pockets of my overalls. “All these bargains and murders and attacks—it’s over now, don’t you think?”

I need her to agree with me.

I don’t quite know why, but I need it with a fresh, hungry urgency writhing in my chest.

If she, Melantha, the mother, the authority figure, decides that no more attackers will come for me, and I will live my life in peace, I will believe it a little more than my own attempts to reassure myself.

Her answer is unsatisfactory. “Who else will hunt you but the dead?”

The wide-eyed look I swerve to her goes ignored. “How many more assassins could he have hired?”

Ridge.

The name thrums in my mind.

He didn’t accept the task for the monies. He wore that enraged revenge for himself. For Luna.

I understand that.

I would kill anyone who took my Eamon from me.

Now I know that I am capable of murder, of death and brutalities inflicted by my bare hands, I know how far I would go to avenge him or, simply, to spare him.

But Ridge wasn’t the only one.

Boil, the nameless beastly male, had a sketched bounty of me in his bag. So I know he accepted the task.

More, I’m sure. Most who took their chances in the Sacrament—but how many of them will continue to hunt on behalf of a dead lord? Sure, it isn’t the promise of the bargain that holds them after the death of Braxis, but rather the promise that his estate will still pay out that bounty, even in his absence.

That means the price is still very much on my head.

I have other enemies too, other threats.

I need to get my mind sorted, organised around the threats, priories them by likelihood, and be better prepared in future.

“What about that blond male, the one always watching us?” I fix my narrowed stare on Melantha. “Bracken.”

There.

A flicker of something.

A flutter of her lashes, so swift and small that if I wasn’t watching her so intently, I might have missed it; the clench of an angled jawline, an echo of the same dimples her son wears; and the faintest creak of leather as she fists her gloved hand by her side.

She says nothing.

So I press, “What’s to stop him from coming after me just to get to your family?”

Melantha slides her inky gaze to me. “For such a frightened thing, you made quite the reckless decision to live here, in a land of lawlessness.”

I jut my chin.

I don’t regret what I’ve done to be here. I don’t regret moving to Kithe and setting up shop with Eamon. I just wish, a little, that I had enough gold and silver to rent a guard of sorts for the rest of my life.

There will be times that no one is around to save me.

But I proved to myself on that mountain I’m more than capable of saving myself. I don’t need anyone—but it sure does help, and I’m not enough of a proud fool to turn my cheek to that. I am not fool enough to believe I will always be able to fight and chew and claw my way out of a corner.

The disappointment comes with a flurry of panic through me. A fear that is cold and lodges a chunk of ice in my throat.

“Bracken,” she echoes the name with an ancient nostalgia, one that glimmers her eyes with distant pain, but curls her upper lip and bares her sharp canines. “Our history has been done—and resolved. You are in no danger, save from his fantasies of destruction and revenge. Any shot he would aim at my house would have been taken in the Sacrament.” She spares me a side-glance. “He will not touch you.”

The ice-ball starts to melt.

It doesn’t dissipate entirely, not with the threat of sleeper assassins out in the streets of Kithe, watching me, hunting me.

“You said the litalf was nervous,” I start, a murmur, “and Eamon guessed it was because of Daxeel. But I do not have that protection anymore. It’s only a matter of time before others realise it.”

Melantha is quiet for a long moment, enough of a moment to turn down a lane, then cut left onto my street.

Then, she stops at the front of a plant shop and turns to face me. “You might be the only evate to have been saved from the bond. It is a wish I sought to fulfil for myself. I searched for answers in all the ways I could when Agnar found me. Males are born with love in their souls for their evates,” she says, a bitter twist to her mouth, “but the females feel no such connection. We are drawn to them in a way, but love?” She shakes her head slightly. “No, we seek our freedoms, we fight for release, and in doing so, we deteriorate any love we might ever have for the male, a self-fulfilling fate, perhaps. Or perhaps males are just beasts and we are justified in our hatred of them.”

A pause floods her in a deep inhale that rises her chest. She simmers in a shuddering lift of rage, one she tries to subdue.

I am still, I am silent.

“When Agnar saw me at Comlar that first time,” she says, her voice breathy, “when the bond awoke, my hand was in Bracken’s. My heart belonged to Bracken. Then Agnar stole me. I was kept in a comfortable dungeon for the duration of the Sacrament. And when I was released, it was into the marriage and the hand of Agnar. Bracken’s male ego is predictable, like most males of our kind—and his revenge was found.”

‘His revenge was found…’

I swallow, thick.

“Bracken hunted me across Dorcha, chased my scent long after the Sacrament came to an end. Years had passed since I last saw him, but I sensed him immediately. His scent was mild, but it is one I knew better than my own.” A wistful smile tugs at her mouth. “I sensed him. I took some seconds to calm my nerves before I would turn to look him in the eye. A lost love. Before I could fill my lungs with breath, he stood behind me—and speared me with two daggers.”

I reel.

My boots scuffs back across the cobblestone, eyes wide.

That wistful smile she wore, it turns bitter. “One blade to my back and the other to the rear of my thigh. Bracken took away what I loved more than anything. More than I ever loved him. My thirst for battle. My love for the fight.” Her grin swells, wide and toothy and pained. “Bracken’s revenge on me was that I would never see battle again, that I would never know again what it is to stand as someone’s formidable opponent. He stole my agility, my strength, my balance and my speed. Now, I can only be the one who sneaks up behind a panicked litalf too distracted by his flurried determination. I am no formidable opponent, not anymore.” Her smile lessens into something mocking. “The blades were ateralum.”

Unhealable wounds, black metal soothed by nothing and no one. I have seen the scars some folk wear from this metal, and I know them to be more permanent than the flesh itself.

I have seen them on Daxeel’s back, whips fashioned from the black metal.

An awful ache blooms in my chest, and it is quick to reach my face and twist it with a grimace.

Pity.

A rare feeling for me, and utterly unwanted. It’s uncomfortable enough to lure my hand to my chest, and I rub as though I can massage away the pain.

“Bracken’s glares,” Melantha tells me, “are for my children who are trophies of my husband’s victory but his own failures, reminders that we will never come to be.”

For a long beat, I just look down at the water-stained toes of my suede boots. The spots are as dark as puddles in a mist of navy blue.

I murmur the confession, “I am sorry.”

The warning in her tone doesn’t go unnoticed; “Do not pity me.”

My mouth slants for a beat. “It isn’t pity. It is truth. I am sorry for your pain in life,” I whisper words I fear to speak, words that open myself too much to a vicious fae, and words she might cut me down for. I find no strength to meet her gaze. “I am sorry for your losses. I am sorry for all that has been taken from you.”

The words I don’t speak linger on my tongue, ‘ I am sorry your son became his father .’ I have smarts enough to silence those words before they can utter.

My jaw rolls once, twice, then I lift my chin—and my gaze lands, not on her, but on the milky reflection of the soap-stained windows of the shopfront.

Melantha’s stare pierces through me.

I toss a glance down the street to the faded red door that leads to a narrow staircase—and ultimately to my dwelling.

There’s an older male hunched on the step beside it, rolling a grimroot in his black-stained fingers. He is not quite an elder, but a long life wears him down to the fine lines around his mouth and the streaks of white in his furry brows.

In the Queen’s Court, I was sheltered from so much. Fae like this, included. The fae who mine for a living, hunt whales and merfolk, the ones who are without homes or contentment, who know nothing of a gentle life. Those who work hard just to feed themselves or have shelter.

I didn’t see many of them around the Queen’s Court.

Now, they are all around—and I am one of them.

“I watched you.” Melantha considers me, still, and has made no move to leave me on the street. She keeps her back to the stained shopfront. “You offered your womb to Mother.”

The look she gives me is cold, but there’s an edge to her lifted chin, an edge of… pride? Approval? I don’t know.

I manage a faint nod in answer.

“Did she accept?”

My mouth flattens. “Since the human realm is suffocating in the Cursed Shadows, I doubt Mother accepted my offer.”

The look she gives me is nothing short of patronising. “Your sacrifice was to protect the light . One might think that means Licht, not the human realm.”

My brow threads together as I mull her words.

I was determined in my wish. The whole time on the mountain, I was winding up to plea with Mother. I made the decision over and over and over in my mind, as though the last time wasn’t a firm enough declaration.

And yet, now that I stand here in the echo of her words, I find I didn’t really know what I was wishing for.

Protect the light…

Whatever that means.

“A womb is too great an offering.” Melantha sighs, curt. “With two of my children gone, and my remaining son too distant, there is no heir to carry on the line. Unless Eamon fulfils his duty to reproduce. Otherwise—” she snaps her fingers. “—an ancient bloodline is gone.”

I fail to see how this is my problem.

I almost ask, why don’t you have more and not push the expectation onto everyone else ? But then, maybe she cannot have more children, or to have more with that brute of a husband is a curse she can’t face again.

A niggle eats at the back of my head.

Just that one niggle, and I understand.

My lashes lower. “I cannot be bargained into reproducing for your bloodline. No matter the protection you have offered me, the help you have given, or the monies I might need—I will not do that.”

Melantha’s mouth twists, bitter.

And so I know I read her correctly.

“Daxeel has spoken very little since he has woken,” Melantha tells me, her tone as dark as her eyes that level me, “and in that silence, so much is said. He is at battle within himself, in a quiet soul. If I am to convince my son to reproduce now, before he leaves for the risk of the other world, then it can only be done with you.”

Sometimes I am selfish, yes. And this is one of those times.

I am sorry, my Eamon, but—

“If the duty lies with Eamon, then you must pursue it with him. Not me.”

With that, I take a curt step back and incline my head in a swift dip, then I leave her on the street.